Finding Insights Without Borders

We are IWB, a global management consultancy firm with a unique approach using Psychodynamic Analysis to uncover systemic problems impeding our client’s success.

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“psychodynamic analysis”

  • Many people believe that what shapes the functioning of organizations is easily visible in what people do and say. Like an iceberg, most of what’s important is not discernable that way. Psychodynamic analysis is the term we use for how we discover the significance of both conscious (visible) and preconscious (hidden) drivers of behavior, creativity and development.

  • Psychodynamic analysis is key to our success at providing value to our clients. Conscious and preconscious organizational psychodynamics have a significant impact on life in all organizations. Most management consultants limit themselves to mechanical views of life in enterprises they consult with. They operate from the myth that sees only surface issues and problems, not the complexities (mokita, blind spots) behind them. This myth is grounded in organizational behavior concepts that are largely rationale in nature — based on assumptions about human beings made by economists or behavioral psychologists who concern themselves with externals. Time and time again, these have proven to be insufficient to uncover the inner workings of organizations. This is the only way to get at the authentic problems that trouble them.

    Our approach, likewise as others are doing, uncovers the hidden dynamics of individual motivation, leadership, interpersonal relationships, collusive situations, social defenses, malformed corporate culture, neurotic leadership, and the extent to which individuals and organizations are prisoners of their past. We too, see organizations as complex adaptive systems with their own conscious and preconscious lives, with rational and irrational components. To provide value to our client’s, nothing less looking more deeply will do.

  • IWB Manifesto; IWB Going Primal; IWB TT&MS; Plamen L. Dimitrov,2008; Zaleznik, 1966; Levinson, 1972, 2002; DeBoard, 1978; Kets de Vries, 1984, 1991, 1994; Kets de Vries and Miller, 1984; Czander, 1993; Gabriel, 1999

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“mental models”

  • How we interpret the world we encounter, is governed by our mental models. These can be psychological representations of real, hypothetical or even imaginary situations. They provide internal stability to us in a world of continuous change. But they also blind us to facts and ideas that challenge or defy our deeply held beliefs. By nature, they’re fuzzy and incomplete. We all have different models, some more elaborate than others, some well-founded and others not grounded at all. In the end, we see and hear what we want to see and hear.

  • We have chosen to use this term to refer to the beliefs, ideas, images, and verbal descriptions, which we consciously and preconsciously acquire from our experiences. When formed, they guide our thoughts and actions within narrow channels. These representations of “perceived reality” explain cause and effect to us, lead us to expect certain results, give meaning to events, and predispose us to behave in certain ways. In working with clients who are stuck in an unworkable place, our approach is to work with clients to shift these models in ways that open new possibilities for them.

  • IWB Manifesto; IWB Going Primal; IWB TT&MS

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“mindscapes”

  • Like a landscape, a mindscape lays out the variety of thinking and behaving presently in a social community. It is the sociology of thinking and behaving or the socio-mental explanation of why our thinking is like or different from the way other people think around us.

  • We introduce this term because seeing our clients as social communities, produces the highest leverage for both uncovering root causes of problems and supporting sustainable solutions. We all are products of distinct social environments that affect, but more importantly, constrain the way we interact with our world. We experience our world personally through our senses and impersonally through mental membership in the social communities we belong to.

    It is not isolated people who think, but individuals in groups with a particular style of thought. It’s a social construction of inter-subjectivity, the psychological relationships between people or shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of experiences in social and cultural life.

    Social Mindscapes are what we do or do not “share in common.” They are the “thought communities” to which we belong. And they are what we work with when engaging a client.

  • Karl Mannheim, 1980. Structures of Thinking. 1940. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. 2001. Sociology as Political Education; Edward Sagarin and Robert J. Kelly — https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546528?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents; Eviator Zerubavel, 1997; IWB Manifesto; IWB Going Primal; IWB TT&MS